Why Business Gets Broken And What To Do About It.

You feel like you used to be headed in the right direction. For a while you were getting the results that you wanted. But now, you’re confused by what you see. You aren’t sure what’s wrong and you’re not happy with where you’re at.

Business breaks for a lot of different reasons.

Sometimes you could have avoided bad things happening by thinking ahead — having a better plan. Sometimes the bad things you are seeing now started off as small, innocent mistakes — a misjudgment you barely notice at the time. Other times, bad things come when you least expect them.

You’ve been doing what you’ve been told to do and it doesn’t seem to work like it used to work. So you do more of it.

You follow the “rules” even more closely.

You double down on the habits and strategies that you remember used to work in the good ol days.

But even that doesn’t seem to change your situation. Business is still broken.

There are four simple truths for achieving turn around. No matter how bad things are or how frustrated and hopeless you feel, there are universal truths that will help you fix your situation.

1. Start moving way outside your comfort zone.

Small efforts won’t fix your situation. You need extreme behavior. Not different behavior. Not more of your old behavior. Not new gimmicky behavior. Extreme behavior.

That is what transforms business. From successful politicians to Olympic athletes to world changing scientists, over a thousand high performers that we studied all exhibited radically extreme behavior. That is what gave them an edge.

They did it in bursts. What no one else was willing to do, they did. That’s true for you as well. You can’t make minor adjustments. You have to push further and farther than anyone else is prepared to do.

2. Start saying “NO” to a lot more things.

Being disciplined is vitally important to your future success. But it’s not just the discipline of what you do that will make you successful.

Transformational discipline is about what you’re determined to deny yourself until you achieve the success you want for yourself. Think about the metrics that you used to determine success. As yourself: “What are things that you should be so saying ‘NO’ to?”

There are a lot of good things — important things — that are not great things. Things that won’t ultimately lead to amazing success. Learn the discipline of the denial. Say “NO”.

3. Start giving your way out of this mess.

No matter how little you have, you still have enough to give a lot. Maybe you can’t give money — but you can give a smile or some of your time.

Giving has an amazing, transformational impact on everyone involved with the gift. The receiver of the gift is delighted and helped and motivated. And the giver gets all of that and much more.

Giving put you back in control of your world. It makes you feel powerful. To be able to give means that you have more than you need. And that realization is usually enough to get you pointed in the right direction with a lot more steam. Winners give more.

4. Start acting like a human.

A lot of good business ideas go sideways because they are based off of “spreadsheet logic”. They lack the emotional intelligence that real, live human beings use to guide their lives on a daily basis.

So what seems like a good business strategy fails because it comes off robotic and contrived.

To be successful, you have to embrace pain and fear and love. You have to understand that what you see on the face of another person isn’t always what’s going on in their soul.

Feel what they feel and you’ll fix what’s broken with your business.

Sometimes business gets broken.

It’s not a fun problem to fix. It requires guts. And there usually isn’t a lot of glory until a lot later.

The truth is that you can fix what’s broken. You don’t have to stay stuck. You don’t need to pretend like you’re fixing things on the outside while you’re quitting on the inside.